If all else failed—why not leap over the dark abyss?
A dreadful calm succeeded his agitation. It was vain to puzzle his brain with a solution of the problem which confronted him, a problem which mocked to scorn his efforts and his prayers.
He closed his eyes, vainly groping for an escape from the dreadful labyrinth of doubt, and sinking deeper and deeper into rumination. Nature at last asserted her rights, and he fell into fitful, uneasy slumbers, in which all the misery of his life seemed to sweep afresh through his heart and to uproot the remotest depths of his tortured soul.
When Eckhardt woke from his stupor, the gray dawn was breaking. As he started up, a face which had appeared against the window quickly vanished. Was it but part of his dream or had he seen Benilo, the Chamberlain?
CHAPTER VII
ARA COELI
t was not till late that night, that Otto found himself alone. He had at last withdrawn from the maddening revelry. Silence was falling on the streets of Rome and the dimness of midnight upon the sky, through which blazing meteors had torn their brilliant furrows. After dismissing his attendants, the son of Theophano sat alone in the lonely chamber of his palace on the Aventine. A sense of death-like desolation had come over him. Never had the palace seemed so vast and so silent. And he—he, the lord of it all—he had no loving heart to turn to, no one, that understood him with a woman's intuition. The waves of destiny seemed to close over him and the circumstances of his past rose poignant and vivid before his fading sight.
But uppermost in his soul was the certainty that he could not further behold Stephania with impunity. When he recalled the meeting in the Minotaurus and the subsequent events of the evening, he lost all peace of mind. What then would be the result of a new meeting? What would become of him, should he thereafter find himself unable to contain his passion in darkness and in silence? Would he exhibit to the world the ridiculous spectacle of an insane lover, or would he, by some unheedful action, bring down upon himself the disdainful pity of the woman, unable as he was to resist the vertigo of her fascination?
He gazed out into the moonlit night. The ancient monuments stood out mournful and deserted as a line of tombs. The city seemed a graveyard, and himself but a disembodied ghost of the dead past.